The Deep Zoo

Candles of Ink

The French occupation of Algeria began in the early nineteenth century. It was characterized by a brutal disregard for the Algerian people, Berber and Arab alike, whose languages, cultures, and landscapes were violently disarticulated. Torture shaped Algeria’s war for independence, as did genocide and the massive deportation of people who died by the tens of thousands in concentration camps.

I lived in Algeria from 1964–1966, and have brooded ever since over the horror of what happened there — horror that continues to shape the present for us all. In the winter of 1964–1965, my then-husband and I hitchhiked from Constantine — in the north — to the southern oases of Biskra, Touggourt, and Ouargla, where we were picked up by a truck driver who was carrying baryte — a kind of barium used in the making of cement — to an American oil rig deep in the desert, at an unnamed place between Hassi ben Harrane and Temassmin. In the middle of the night, he left the road to navigate by the stars. I recall that the lights from the rig became visible hours before we reached it, and that no oil had been found. They were digging in six hundred meters of salt.

Although the violence had ceased about seventeen months earlier, the war had left traces everywhere. They were visible in the scarred mountains that had been mined, the many villages burned to the ground, the immense napalmed areas along the Tunisian border, and on the face of the truck driver, who had been tortured for weeks with live electric wire. The burns had left a kind of indigo script at the corners of his nostrils, his mouth and eyes, and in the delicate hollows beneath his ears. His dignity, he claimed, was recovered at the moment of his country’s independence; the term he used was self-determination. He told us that throughout his ordeal, he had refused to speak. That now it pleased him to eat and to sleep “in his own time.” During that long night, he did not eat nor drink.

The novel I am currently writing is an attempt to enter into his country’s tragic story, and to reconstruct my memories of that extraordinary time and place. Because, if I shall always be a trandji — and this is a marvelous Arabization of the French word étranger, or “foreigner”—a forty years’ haunting demands, at the very least, a leap of faith and mind.

The early Arab scholars named the first language lughat sûrryâniyya: the language of the sun’s illumination. The hot bones and breath of this language of light persist and are revealed in a book written by the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Ibn ‘Arabî, called The Book of Mîm, Wâw, and Nûn. Vowels that like snakes bite their own tails, the Mîm, Wâw, and Nûn are the tangible expressions (not to be confused with artifacts) of the original event. They are the sparks that ignite the “sacred community of letters” and curiously, they are also the “sublime dwelling” that contains the promise of the entire alphabet. Written in candles of ink, sacred texts are secreted in the bodies of calligraphic lions and mazes and mazed trees of life. I should add that the Koran calls things that are concealed katta: rendered calligraphically And that in Arabic, the verbs “to write” and “to release” are one and the same.

To animate the dry bones of overuse and to illuminate the riddles of divine intention, the sacred words are sparked: these allow them to leap like flames and, like crystals, to scatter light. And they demand a pause, an intake of breath. A measured breathing is essential to the writing of calligraphy, which is also a form of rigorous choreography. Breath punctuates and enlivens a text whose initial impulse, after all, was breath. The pauses are windows also, by means of which we are invited to dream, to, in the words of Gaston Bachelard, be more “vividly alive.” He is evoking poetic leaps of mind, a process essential to the reception of new ideas and novel connections, what the Kabalists call skipping and jumping. The word for vowel sounds in Arabic is harakât, which also means “movement.”

Like the mazed halls and galleries of a museum, the calligraphic itineraries I have described impose a way of proceeding and are all about the unfolding of knowledge. They offer a practice of seeing, and the promise of far-seeing. This parallel between the museum and the sacred text also informs the novel I am writing, as do those emblems so dear to Italo Calvino: the flame and the crystal.

Situated in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris’s oldest mineralogy museum was not conceived as a cabinet of curiosities, but as a place of scientific inquiry. Its collections are extensive—1,509 examples of tourmaline alone! The name Jardin des Plantes is misleading, as the entire garden is even now a research center claiming a number of distinct buildings, housing laboratories, and collections essential to the study of the natural sciences. It also continues to be one of the few places in Paris that, despite the congestion and conquest of so-called free marketeering, continues to enchant the senses and offer the lyrical coincidences once so beloved of the city’s Surrealists. I was there just last month researching a new novel; it was late December; in another hour I would run into a glass door and break my nose. The pollarded trees signaled — in Koranic Kufic — the fingers of coral that were about to greet me.

That afternoon I saw what seemed to be fossil flowerets of cauliflower but were in fact a mineral labeled “Barytine”; an obsidian mirror that belonged to Montezuma — the very mirror that failed to warn him of the dangers about to submerge him; and I was dwarfed by a crystal of salt.

My novel is narrated by a professor of mineralogy whose particular fascination is image stones, stones that appear to contain landscapes and figures and even fragments of calligraphy. I had read Roger Caillois:

The fact is that there is no creature or thing, no monster or monument, no happening or sight in nature, history, parable, or dream whose image the predisposed eye cannot read in the markings, patterns, and outlines found in stones.

Already, I had described the image stones from Caillois’s collection, things I had seen in photographs only. Unexpectedly, I found them on display in a cabinet in the museum’s Great Hall — the very same stones Caillois named “Calligraphy” or “Royal Calligraphy.” In other words, I found myself face to face with the very same stones that had enchanted my novel’s narrator:

These appear to be traced over with a reed pen dipped in cream. What’s more, each stone could well exemplify a particular style of classical Arabian calligraphy: Naskhi, Riga, Thuluth. One can even make out certain letters: the vertical alif, the horizontal jim. The perfect proportions sought after by the scribes are in evidence, as are the sparks that are said to set the words on fire.

As when a dream snake, biting its tail, revealed the structure of benzene to the chemist Kekulé, the dream released something that was sleeping in the chemist’s mind all along. As when the lover of a Berber girl licks the symbolic text that is tattooed upon her breast, and swallowing, embodies and releases the alphabet of desire. An alphabet that, like the letters of the sun’s illumination, is sacred, eternal, and profoundly human.